TEN

It might have been just after midnight. The rain continued to tap on the glass insistently and with stubborn determination, like the beak of a sparrow breaking down a piece of bread too large to be swallowed in one bite.

Don Fiorentino did not change his clothes. He wanted them to accompany him on the most important viaticum of his life. His. Wet with rain and soaked in resentment. On the desk he left an almost untouched box of Tuscan cigars, the last letters he had written and the bottle of ink that he had forgotten opened, also left there, by coagulating its indelible contents.

Then, he lay down and must have even been asleep for a couple of hours, judging by the fact that the clock read ten to three in the morning. His clothes were drying on him, judging by the disappearing sensation of wetness on his skin.

He was tempted to randomly reopen the book Unamuno had sent him from the past. He gave in to temptation and found himself reading:

“In the catechism we were accustomed to believing what we have not seen: this is faith. Believing what we see – and what we do not see – is reason, science; and believing what we will see – or not see – is hope And it is every belief. I affirm, I believe, as a poet, as a creator, looking towards the past, towards the memory; I deny, as I reason, as a citizen, looking at the present; and I doubt, I struggle, I agonize as I am a man, as I am a Christian, looking towards the unachievable future (…)”

He did not even finish the sentence. Everything was clear to him.

Then, he placed the book in one of his pockets and began to quickly write a few lines on a piece of paper that he put in the same place to accompany that murderous book, like the whole truth. He walked through the bedroom door, which he left open behind him, and headed with short but determined steps towards the bell tower. He felt tired climbing the steps, and when he reached the top he once again had a shooting pain in his liver. In his mouth the bitter, disgusting, yellowish taste of his bile. To his God, who had left him without allowing him to be able to ask the reason why, he addressed himself with the words of Simeon:

“O Lord, now let your servant go in peace,

according to your word;

because my eyes have seen your salvation

prepared by you before all peoples;

light to enlighten the people

and glory of your people Israel.”

He climbed, with some discomfort due to the wild plants growing around the railing left there to rot, on the parapet, tripping his path and looked down.

The rain had not stopped crying his tears on that day of waiting, but he no longer felt the dizziness that had accompanied him during his robust existence made of bread. He let go. The flight seemed infinitely long and extended to him, but he did not even have the possibility to notice its natural end.

They found him again after two hours, with a hint of a smile now fixed by rigor mortis on his face washed by rainwater. Just a thin trickle of blood ran from his mouth. The medical examiner wrote, bored by the unusual hour and by that stubborn water, that he had died between three o’clock and a quarter past three because of a collapse of the internal organs. Someone searched his pockets and took out a note whose ink had been marked by the rain, but which still clearly read “God, when he does not know what to do with us, he kills us.”

No one ever found any trace of the book.

In the distance a rooster crowed.